Dilong's Popularity

Small tyrannosaurids are popular dinosaurs for good reason. They represent what will become, or in the instance of juveniles already are, a group of enormous carnivorous dinosaurs that captivate the information. Combine the fantastic size and terror of these dinosaurs with the fantastical imagery of feathers and scales mingling across the different regions of the tyrannosaur body and suddenly we have a majestic and terrifying animal that the public loves. Smaller versions, the ancestral forms, are even more peculiar, because they are very tyrannosaurid in shape, but much smaller in all dimensions. Dilong and other base-of-the-tree tyrannosaurids also possess a slightly more generic body plan that is similar to members of earlier clades, making their mixture of tyrannosaurid and "other theropod" features curious but intriguing.

©Robinson Kunz